Sociable poetics: Representing and interpreting culture and difference in Nepal's middle hills [electronic resource]
說明
419 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-01, Section: A, page: 0243
Supervisors: James Brow; Steven Feld
Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Texas at Austin, 1999
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the poetic and interpretive practices of Sherpa and Tamang villagers who are ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities within a nationalizing state. It traces a cultural poetics, aesthetics, or style of open-endedness and indeterminacy through everyday sociable and expressive practices in a middle-hills village in northeastern Nepal. It opens with discussions that ground the reader in the everyday sociability, hardships, talk, and mobility of village lives, locating them in terms of their relationships to a local landscape and to a nationalizing state, within which they travel frequently. The dissertation continues with an analysis of caste, ethnicity, and national identity, placing villagers' discourses about social difference in contrast to national discourses. It argues that the former emphasize flexibility, contingency, and reciprocal sociability whereas the latter are primarily concerned with problems of definition, categorization, and, often, ranking
The dissertation's second half involves more detailed and technical analyses of verbal and musical materials in village life. It analyzes narratives and songs, their contexts, their contents, their formal characteristics, and their meaningfulness. It addresses questions of interpretation, of how words are understood by villagers to produce meanings, and of how the agency or authority for discourse meanings is distributed. Taken together, these chapters argue for an iconicity of form that connects villagers' aesthetic preference for unfinalized, interpretable openness and indeterminacy in the form, context, and content of expressive genres to (1) their interactional emphasis on reciprocity, participation, and collaborative social practice and (2) the way they understand different peoples, cultures, styles, and practices to be metaculturally (dis)ordered within a social universe
This dissertation contributes to current debates within anthropology about the relationships that discourse, poetics, and expressive culture have to sociality, work, and the constitution of identity. It demonstrates the fruitfulness of understanding both referential and non-referential ways of producing meaning and of placing these in conjunction with questions of power, spatiality, and social difference
